Ueda Akinari

Ueda Akinari was born in 1734 in Ōsaka, the son of a woman from the pleasure quarters and an unknown father, and was adopted by an oil and paper merchant. Smallpox, contracted in childhood, left his fingers deformed. He ran the family business without success until a fire carried it off, then practised medicine in Ōsaka. A philologist of the ancient letters, he engaged in polemics with Motoori Norinaga. A widower in 1797 or 1798 depending on the sources, almost blind, he dictated his last texts and died in Kyōto in 1809, after years of wandering in poverty.

In the catalogue 1

• TaleTales of Moonlight and Rain雨月物語Ueda Akinari · 1776Literature